Are you a loyal person? Probably you see yourself as loyal, since it’s fair to assume that most people consider loyalty as a good moral value to have. It seems like a good thing to be loyal, that is to be faithful to your people and to your ideas in general. Loyalty is a commitment, it is about staying firmly faithful even in difficult times. The typical scenario in which someone’s loyalty is tested is when they face a dilemma in which they have a strong reason to ditch their earlier commitment; if they stand committed and accept to suffer consequences for it, they are loyal. If not, they might enjoy some reward for reneging on their commitment, but they also become a traitor, and everyone hates a traitor.
In the real world, it’s not so often that your loyalty is tested in any serious way. People may feel that they have to go to a boring event out of loyalty to their family for instance, but they seldom have to risk life and limb for their loved ones. So it’s common that someone would be described as loyal because it’s an easy quality to have, it doesn’t require much sacrifice. You can even be loyal to a shop: you earn loyalty points for coming back to the shop.1 What a tough sacrifice, right? So when you don’t know what to say about someone and you have to say something, you can always say that they are loyal: it’s always true in some vague sense, and it’s a nice thing to say since people think of it as strong moral value. See the trick here? Most of the time it actually doesn’t mean anything or very little, but in our mind we still think “oh yes, it’s good because there are not so many loyal people anymore.”
The other one that can easily be used to describe pretty much anybody is integrity. Loyalty and integrity form a magic combo, saying that a person has both is like giving them a seal of approval of moral rectitude. Again, integrity is rarely seriously tested, so it’s an easy win. In fact, loyalty and integrity are often used as an empty way to say nice thing about someone, typically to introduce them to somebody else and vouch for them at the same time.
It’s very likely that members of the mafia value loyalty a lot, and usually they are not very compassionate with people who are seen as disloyal: “this guy was not loyal to the family, we had to take care of him”. However it’s unlikely that they feel the same way about integrity: if a mafioso says that a cop has strong moral principles, it’s probably not out of admiration, as they tend to prefer corruptible people. It’s likely that this reasoning applies to most criminals and to morally wrong behaviours in general: friends should be loyal, as in they shouldn’t snitch; so there is a moral code there, but it doesn’t include integrity, or at least not in the commonly accepted sense.
And what does it mean to be loyal for a cop? A loyal cop doesn’t betray their colleagues. A loyal cop firmly supports their buddy even if it’s risky; so if their buddy “makes a mistake”, for instance he hits a suspect a little too hard,2 the loyal cop offers a false witness statement to support the colleague. And what does it mean for this cop to have integrity? Well, pretty much the opposite: if they have strong moral principles, they should honestly report what happened even if that implies betraying a colleague. Dilemma: loyalty and integrity may contradict each other.
You can’t really trust somebody loyal to you, because they’re not honest. See Putin’s officials in the Russian government and army: they’re extremely loyal, because they were chosen for precisely this reason and they understand that their interest is to serve him well. They support him, so they don’t want to disappoint or upset him: they pretend that everything is fine, that the Russian army is strong and capable of conquering Ukraine within a few days; his information services tell him that he’s right, most Ukrainians love Russia and would happy to see the Russian army take over. But constantly protecting somebody’s feelings doesn’t prepare them to the world, let alone to decide a war. That’s the problem with loyal people, they’re not honest because of their unconditional support: being honest with somebody means telling them the bad news and telling them when they’re wrong.
People often confuse trust and loyalty. A person who is really honest with you (and with themselves) will not support you unconditionally, they need their freedom to walk out of the relationship if things don’t work out between you two. Somebody who would blindly help you to hide a body is a loyal friend, but maybe not one that you can trust: if they can put their loyalty to you before respecting their own moral principles, it means that they don’t actually have any moral principle. By definition a loyal person is at risk of not being honest, since they prioritize unconditional support over anything else.3 The freedom to respect one’s own wishes and opinions is a necessary basis for somebody to be a trustable person. This implies that you might even go against “your own people” if the circumstances require it.
When one thinks about it, corruption is a friendly deal between pals: between “friends”, let’s simplify and bypass whatever bureaucratic legal requirement is in place. It’s relying on the loyalty link between the participants in order to maximize their interests, exactly like in the mafia. It’s the same process for hiring discrimination, neighbourhood segregation, and various other kinds of arrangements between people of the same “family”: it is assumed that people should be loyal to their people and therefore should favour “their own people”, even if this is unfair to everybody else. In fact, people don’t even think about the unfair side of it: it feels natural and logical to hire a schoolmate or family member, for instance. But this causes an invisible violence to the multiple anonymous other people who are deprived of the opportunity. In a sense, the complex and bureaucratic nature of democratic mechanisms are intended to prevent this kind of natural loyalty between friends, family, schoolmates from causing unfair stuff.
I don’t know why we hate traitors that much. I suspect that it’s one of these misguided principles meant to preserve the Holy Conservative Order:4 loyalty implies a form of rigid social order, since one has to prioritize their family, their friends, their colleagues, their team, their country… over whatever else could be good for them. We think that it’s going to be hell if people just follow their desires or instincts, even though there’s actually good evidence that violence is often caused by repressed feelings and intolerance. A whistleblower is by definition a traitor to their organization; a person who resists the oppression of a dictatorship or colonizing country is technically a traitor to their country. It’s all a matter of perspective of course, doing the right thing has nothing to do with loyalty or treason.
Isn’t loyalty just a good old fascist5 value, after all? Like all these supposedly rightful moral principles: love your family, work hard, love your country… Let’s gently disassemble the Holy Conservative Order: don’t be loyal, just be honest.
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Note that loyalty doesn’t always work in a world where people are encouraged to change and adapt fast. Being loyal to an employer is obsolete, considering that very few employers are loyal to their employees. The capitalist competition doesn’t favour loyalty: if the new shop is cheaper, nobody want to stay loyal to the old one. ↩︎
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Feel free to pick a different example of somebody who highly values their institution witnesses a colleague doing something wrong: a cop taking a bribe to leave a criminal alone; a drunk doctor botching a surgical operation; a professor abusing female students; a politician taking a bribe; a soldier torturing prisoners, etc. ↩︎
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By the way this is often what destroys dictatorships: the dictator wants obedient yes-men who support him unconditionally, because this seems the most direct way to obtain what he wants (and also it flatters his ego). But he doesn’t realize that this also deprives him of honest feedback and realistic contradiction, two things that one needs in order to make the right decisions in the long term. ↩︎
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I’m (probably) inventing this term. The idea is that conservative people want things to stay as they are: powerful people because they have a vested interest in this, all other people because they are scared that things would get worse for themselves. As the glorious descendants of a fearful humankind, we inherited the principles meant to keep ourselves “in the right path”, the one where order is maintained. ↩︎
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I’m using the word “fascist” in the broad sense of traditional, authoritarian, arrogant and violent. By the way, people often forget that arrogance is a defining characteristic of fascism: whatever their group identity is, they always believe that their group is the best in the world and deserves to be recognized as such. Essentially fascists are just capricious kids in need of love. Everyone knows that, right? ↩︎